Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook, listened on the way to meet a spirit doctor]

A Fools Wisdom by Steven Young

This is a terrible book. DO. NOT. WASTE. YOUR. TIME!

Hiding somewhere within these pages (waveforms) there is a germ of a good idea. The author manages to trample that good idea by riding roughshod over it with a naïve and ill informed loathing for the scientific community. The baby is well and truly out with the bathwater.

The good idea is a question which is worth asking. What happens if the house of cards that is theoretical physics were to fall down? This is something that could happen, a lot of it is made of people doing thought experiments and basing their experiments upon other peoples thought experiments – if there were something in that chain that was not sound the whole lot could crash down. The thing about science, which the author constantly misses, is that it is always looking for ways to falsify itself and figure out better theories. It is self-healing.

He makes the assertion that the edifice has already crashed down because it was built on false assumptions. He disregards all of the physical sciences because theoretical physics is made of assumptions, and proceeds to describe how all the science you know is wrong, and suggest that anyone who still believes it is indoctrinated into a cult.

A lot of this rejection of science is based on conspiracy theories and bizarre twisting of coincidences, along with a denial that the scientific method applies to any science at all. For sure, there are parts of science which have a questionable relationship with the method, notably the theoretical side of physics. This cannot be extrapolated to all science.

He spends some time with unnecessary ad hominem attacks on Stephen Hawking, with very little point except that ‘no-one would attack a mute in a wheelchair, his theories are unquestionable…so I’m going to question them’. A conflation of the person with the science generated by that person. Take issue with the science, not the person.

There is an exploration of alchemy and its practice in the modern world, which is somewhat breathless and most of the ideas would be more at home in codices of the fifteenth century, before we invented the scientific method.

He ends the book trying to redesign the musical scale because he doesn’t trust irrational numbers.

All-in-all this is not the book I wanted. I wanted to hear about why theoretical physics was broken and what we could do to fix it, rather than be told that we should just throw the whole lot out and regress five hundred years. A Fools Wisdom indeed.